Ryanair FR506 Dublin to Bristol

[tomahawk_pa38]

Anybody know why this flight has diverted to Birmingham please ? It shows on FR24 as doing 3 laps at Bristol and is now on finals for BHX. If the pax have to go by road it'll take long to get from BHX to BRS than the original journey from Dublin would have been !

[Johnny F@rt Pants]

Fog and low cloud at Bristol.

[tomahawk_pa38]

Thanks - Bristol does have some strange weather. I remember not to long ago flying down from Glasgow to Bristol in clear blue skies. Then as we turned onto finals somewhere over Keynsham, low cloud appeared way below us. As we descended I could see clearly to the right and left but couldn't see the ground at all - then after a good few minutes, the cloud slid up the window and almost immediately we hit the runway and could barely see anything outside. Must have been a very shallow but thick blanket of cloud.

[Big Eric]

Bristol airport is up on a hillside and regularly gets hill-fog.

[MerchantVenturer]

As has been said, BRS sits on top of a 600 foot plateau (Broadfield Down) which often has its own micro climate. It's not unknown for runway visibility to be 100 metres yet a quarter of a mile away it can be half a mile.

The Cat 3b ILS has helped considerably since its installation about 15 years ago but it's only installed on runway 27. It's not installed on the reciprocal 09 as I understand the topography on approach could make the system unreliable.

Yesterday the active runway was 27 but five of the approximate 70 BRS arrivals diverted:

FR 8122 due 1135 from Malaga went to BHX
EZY 6052 due 1235 from Malaga went to CWL
FR 506 due 1335 from Dublin went to BHX
BM 1846 due 1710 from Munich went to CWL
TCX 7107 due 1810 from Arrecife went to CWL

On an aviation forum with which I'm involved I questioned why other aircraft were landing around the time these aircraft diverted. I received a reply from someone associated with one of the airlines at BRS who said that it was a combination of low cloud and excessive wind gusts and that these aircraft were probably unlucky in that they appeared when the weather, which had been capricious all day (well it was where I live about seven miles from BRS), was behaving particularly badly.

Looking at the CAA diversions stats over recent years there seems no doubt that the Cat 3 has improved matters but the perennial problem will remain of having an airport situated on top of a mist-laden hill.

[tomahawk_pa38]

Yep - should have used Filton with excellent road and railway access whle they had the chance. I worked for British Rail in theseventies and remember standing on the Henbury line which goes parallel with the runway and only a few yards from it when Concorde taxied by and took off only yards from where I was standing - what a racket - what a sight ! Then of course they built all the nimby houses at Bradley Stoke and that ws the end of that.

[MerchantVenturer]

In the mid 1990s BAE applied to have a city airport at Filton. Following a government inspector enquiry the relevant secretary of state (may have been Selwyn Gummer) rejected the application.

With hindsight Bristol Corporation, as the city council was known then, should have pushed for Filton when they closed their Bristol Whitchurch airport in the 1950s on the grounds that it was too small for future aircraft types - that wheel keeps on turning.

Instead they opted for the former RAF Lulsgate Bottom (sounds almost Shakespearean), by then a glider club, which they were able to purchase. Filton, had the then owners Bristol Aeroplane Company (long since swallowed up in what is now BAE) been willing to have a civil airport on its works aerodrome, may not have been considered although claims surface from time to time that the city council could have gone to Filton as tenants at a peppercorn rent. Had they done so we can only speculate what sort of operation might be in place there today.

In fairness, regional airports such as Bristol were little more than quaint sideshows 60 years ago and no-one could have foreseen how the low-cost airline industry would revolutionise previously sleepy little airports. Even 20 years ago no-one, not even the indomitable Les Wilson (Mr Bristol Airport, the airport MD who was killed in a car accident in the mid 1990s) would have been so bold as to venture that BRS would be handling nearly seven million passengers a year by 2015.